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Obama the patriot

By Roger Hernandez
Columnist

POSTED:June 12, 2008 5:00 a.m.

Everybody knows about the two speeches Barack Obama needed to get past, or at least try to get past, his pastor problem. There was the first one, early March in Philadelphia, when he said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons "expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country," yet he insisted, "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother."Then there was the second speech, after Wright's rantings about a government plot to spread AIDS in black communities revealed to the world his hallucinations about the nature of America. A visibly stunned Obama disowned him -- and learned that he didn't have to also disown his grandma or blacks in general.But there was a third speech. It came after Obama's win in North Carolina. And it helped the candidate muscle his now former pastor into a locked sound-proof box from which no more damaging YouTube loops can escape (at least until Republicans try to smash it open).Yet in that victory speech Obama did not mention Wright, or even allude to the maelstrom that threatened his viability as a presidential candidate. What he did was try to soothe, without saying that's what he was doing, the fear that fed that maelstrom: Patriotism.It all came down to the anxiety that a man who might be President of the United States did not love his country.The entire Wright episode has been denounced as a distraction from discussion of "real issues" like the economy, health care, the war in Iraq, terrorism, immigration (remember that?) and America's deteriorated image and declining influence on the world stage.But the questions raised by Obama's relationship with the delusionally anti-American Wright did constitute a real issue. Obama needed to show that he loves this country as much as any old-fashioned Ronald Reagan patriot, even without the flag pin. Which is what he did in North Carolina."This is the country that made it possible for my mother -- a single parent who had to go on food stamps at one point -- to send my sister and me to the best schools in the country on scholarships," he said. "I know the promise of America because I have lived it. It is the light of opportunity that led my father across an ocean. It is the founding ideals that the flag draped over my grandfather's coffin stands for -- it is life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."Back in that Philadelphia speech, he spoke in front of an array of U.S. flags, and praised the Founding Fathers, but he also denounced America's original sin -- the hypocrisy of permitting slavery in the world's first democracy. Noting that then, in the context of trying to explain his relationship with Wright, was necessary.In North Carolina, however, the task was to get past Wright and affirm the patriotism that had been questioned. Which he did as well as anyone could have hoped.Time to stop it about Jeremiah Wright.

Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology. His latest book is "Cubans in America" (Kensington). Read his blog at www.rogerhernandez.blogspot.com.